[ Page 4 of 6 ]

The projects include designing virtual power plants to promote the Department of Energy’s “Vision 21” project, which will create environmentally friendly power-generation structures. The digital projects, made with 3ds max 5 and Mental Ray (3D animation and rendering software used by digital effects houses such as Industrial Light and Magic), are designed for the year 2020. The project gave the designers leeway to create structures that tested limits, overthrew conventions of plant design, and challenged their imagination. “The parameters for these projects differ drastically from most client work, although the design challenges are similar in many ways. The Department of Energy gave us an enormous amount of design freedom. It’s kind of a dream project,” says Di Simone.

KDLAB’s sleek designs challenge power plants’ intimidating, grimy image. There are no smokestacks, for instance, because the plants will utilize new combustion processes that convert fossil fuels to power in a cleaner, more efficient manner than in the past. KDLAB has also dedicated much of the footprints of each power plant to greenspace. One design in their repertoire is a 65-story, bioclimatic skyscraper in the middle of Lower Manhattan that has a memorable, aerodynamic form more reminiscent of a sports car than a structure where electricity is generated. “We wanted it to be something that would shatter people’s conception of what a power plant should look like and where it could be located,” says Kosinski. In addition to a bank of fuel cells and a gas turbine in the basement, the building also has photovoltaic cells integrated into its facade and a wind turbine on its roof to generate additional electricity.

ADVERTISEMENT

Another KDLAB construction, the Desert H2Ouse, is an environmentally friendly residence that reuses water collected from an on-site aquifer. It’s featured in a two-minute animated film that has been traveling to animation festivals around the world, taking second place at the 2001 WebCuts Internet film festival in Berlin. The fusion of film and architecture is something that interests KDLAB, whether researching the re-creation of light phenomena in the computer or the digital simulation of a handheld camera. When introducing Desert H2Ouse into the design category of the 2001 RESFEST Film Festival, organizers coined a new term in its description—Cinema Architectura.

Another digital architect, Winka Dubbledam, head of New York City firm Archi-Tectonics, created a 3D exhibition called From HardWare to SoftForm with the help of MIT’s Media Lab. The exhibition shows the central space of a house the firm built, morphed, twisted, and reconstituted in virtual space. Another conceptual project, Flex City, offers a plan to redevelop Lower Manhattan. It changes in real time on-screen as users plug in various social criteria. Buildings expand and contract, and greenspaces shrink or enlarge, as the user decides what the value of the stock market is and who will be in political office in the next few years.

Dubbledam describes this piece, and all her architecture, as “intelligent” because of its flexibility and adaptability, common themes in virtual architecture. “I thought it was more important to show people what’s possible and explore what defines a city,” she says. The computer, she says, lets people do research and set criteria for themselves.

Virtual architects also work on nonbuilding projects such as Web sites and digital exhibitions. Asymptote, a New York firm, designed an interactive landscape for the Guggenheim’s online Virtual Museum. Taking the deformed structures of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao even further, the Web site’s central visual motif, a loose spiral reminiscent of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, deconstructs and morphs itself according to the choices of the user, who “flies” through the site to explore its various sections, such as exhibition information or the museum itself.

Architects, says Lise Anne Couture, one of Asymptote’s founders, are highly qualified to design in the virtual world as well as the physical one. “We are experts in spatiality and well trained to be able to deal with complexity,” she says. Peter Anders, author of the book Envisioning Cyberspace: Designing 3D Electronic Spaces (McGraw-Hill Professional, 1998), points out that the design of 3D online worlds like “Collaboratories,” where users interact with each other in a visually active virtual-reality space, will keep architects busy for years to come.